Rescuing our schools - After a one-year breather!

After a 12-month hiatus, I've picked up the "pen" again, spurred on by dogged determination to finish this critique and consideration of the current K-12 educational mess.

Since my last post below, written on January 17, 2006, I've learned a lot more than I knew a year ago, but interestingly, have earned the contempt of (and have been ignored by) local educators and their supporters--who, I've learned (duh!), have too much personally invested in the present, corrupt system to advocate fundamental reform. In fact, many if not most of the senior educators today are the system's administrators who were the very ones that promoted and developed the nutty philosophies and outlandish techniques that led to today's mess. Anyhow, here we go again.

In Part 2, the elephant we've been laying our hands on to get some idea of what it is, but we might not yet feel comfortable with the image we getting--we're just getting the idea that it's a enormous "beast," and that trying to deal with it won't be easy. As my now retired poly-sci professor (jailed by both Nazis and Communists) e-mailed me recently:

"[Yours] is truly an Herculean undertaking because with few exceptions mediocrity in K-12 has been institutionalized. . . . [You] are somewhere between Mother Teresa in pants and Don Quixote."

My professor attributed me with more future effectiveness than I myself expect to achieve, but that's because in his indefatigable pedagogical habit, I suspect he doesn't want to discourage the early enthusiasm of his overly eager undergraduate student whose eyes he opened. That notwithstanding, his commentaries in several exchanges were designed to encourage me in what has also become his own personal crusade the past 25 years--reforming higher education, a coincidental and fortuitous event for me because, as the lyrics of a 1950s pop tune goes, "you can't have one without the other."

In Part 3 that follows this, I'll attempt to examine the question: "What is the purpose of education?" Or rephrased: "What do we want our system to achieve?" that is, "The Purpose." The final Part 4 will examine some specific steps that can be taken immediately and those longer-range steps that are critical to real reform.